OnePlus launched the OnePlus 2 last year with Lollipop, and there it has stayed all through the launch of Android 6.0 Marshmallow. Some of the more established OEMs have already gotten 6.0 updates out the door (even those that have to go through carriers). Now it's almost OP's turn to update devices to Marshmallow. There's a beta for OxygenOS 3.0, which is based on Marshmallow. You can install it right now, if you like.

OnePlus calls this a "community build" because it wants members of the community to install and test it. It won't be sent out OTA, so you'll have to download and flash the installer. Here's the changelog posted by OP.

Android 6.0.1 Marshmallow upgrade

New OnePlus Camera UI

UI has been cleaned up: swiping up/down now switches between photo/video, whereas HD/HDR and flash settings live in the top right corner

You can now change the aspect ratio and toggle grid view without going all the way to the settings

New wallpaper picker

Easily preview and set both home screen and lock screen wallpaper in one place.

Shelf UX has been improved

No more edit mode, long press boards to rearrange or remove

General system performance improvements

Benchmarked 47% faster than OxygenOS 2.2.1 on key test scenarios

Fingerprint performance improvement

Tested 45% faster than OxygenOS 2.2.1 on average

Settings changes

Old app permissions are gone, say hi to new (native Android) app permissions.

Alert Slider has its own entry point with more customization options

Improved settings menu readability by changing the order a bit

March security patches

You can install this 1.1GB build on the OnePlus 2 as long as you are completely stock and running v2.2.0 or higher. Flashing back to the Lollipop build of OxygenOS will require a complete device reset, so make sure you back things up. OnePlus also cites a number of potential issues.

Your fingerprints will not be preserved after you flash the new build, so you will need to re-register your fingerprints if you have fingerprint authentication set up

Maxxaudio tuner and presets will be removed

Rolling back to previous OxygenOS versions will not work without wiping data

Some soak testers have experienced wifi speed issues which we are investigating

Some of your old apps won’t work without an upgrade to M compatible versions

Shelf frequent apps board size might shrink if you are dirty flashing. Remove and re-add the board and it will fix itself

Language localization is still being improved

All of the changes with fingerprints are due to the move from OP's in-house solution to the standard Android API. The OnePlus permission manager is also gone, replaced with Marshmallow's native permission settings. It's not clear how you'll go about updating to the final build when that is available. I'd bet on a full system image flash, so you might want to hold off if you don't want to deal with resetting your device. Scratch that, OP says you'll still get OTAs.

Comments

"It won't be sent out OTA, so you'll have to download and flash the installer."

I don't think they've ever sent an OTA update.

RyanWhitwam

Can't tell if you're joking. They've sent out a number of minor updates OTA.

Keith

Not joking. I don't own one but really every time I see a story posted regarding a OnePlus update it's always a zip file you need to download and manually flash.

Powsniffer0110

Oh, you don't own one. So you don't know! Hahah. Tired of idiots like you. They have updated almost everyone with OTA. You're just a blind, idiot hater.

Keith

lol, brow-beating on the internet. Correct, I am an idiot hater.

AuroraFlux

> "I made an incorrect claim and now I'm getting super upset that people are calling me out on it. I'll just vaguely say something about nexusmasterrace and it'll be okay!"

Thanks for your input.

Keith

Correct... bring on the hatred, second-class OnePlus owners.

AuroraFlux

I own a Nexus 6P. I'm just not a fucking moron, and I'm capable of reading.

Keith

I'd like to own a 6P, fgt.

anees

erm... they post zips while also sending OTA like almost every month (OP2 owner)

Keith

lol, I'll just stick to Nexus.

marcusmarcus2

So you are going to stick with Nexus that releases OTAs as well as flashable images compared to OnePlus who do OTA updates as well as releases these flashable images?

Keith

Correct...

marcusmarcus2

OK. Just making sure I understand your "reasoning".

Keith

Yeah you got it.

Simon

Oneplus X owner here. I like forward to the MM update. But I can wait because my X was already a huge update coming from a 3.5 yr old ICS4.0.4 Motorola XT885, super buggy with a plain dead battery giving me 1 hour of screen on time..

Felix Matthies

"This build is OTA eligible which means you’ll receive future OTAs on this build so don’t worry about not getting updates if you flash this."

It's stated in the forum above the "What's new"-section.

Grayson

I don't understand what's taking them so long to update. Oxygen OS is about as close to stock Android as you can get without being a Nexus. Even though they likely have less engineers working on it than larger companies, it still seems like it should have taken no more than 2 or 3 months max. Somebody should be fired. Not sure if it should be the engineers for being lazy or slow or management if they assigned them to work on new phones before updating the old phone.

AuroraFlux

It's because unlike the CM developers, the PA "developers" are egotistical morons. They had something so original and so unique back when they were developing ParanoidAndroid, but their idiotic fear of CM and sudden distrust of using any CM-related code was their downfall.

They went off to work for OnePlus because OnePlus assumed they knew what they were doing. Now OP is probably aware that all that the PA devs ever did was take 8 months to build a feature that CM already had working, and then hide it behind stupid triggers that only showed up the first time you tried to do something (like the "High Volume Warning Dialog" option; it would only show up as a modal dialog if you raise the volume past a certain level).

Not much respect for them. They abandoned their ROM, let down their community, and now they're letting down OnePlus (who sadly need a software win now more than ever).

someone755

I love how you have no ground to stand on here except that they were slow on updates and yet you hate them with a passion. The part of them that I ever talked to was a great group of people.

OmniROM gets praise for not using any CM code. It just so happens their team is a lot bigger than PA's.
And PA isn't dead. Nobody ever said that. Just because everyone's gone into hiding and because you see nothing on GitHub (ever heard of private repositories?) doesn't mean nothing's being worked on.

I also wonder how much you know about working as a software dev under OnePlus: Who can say with full determination that these Paranoid Android developers are the sole factor here?

AuroraFlux

> I love how you have no ground to stand on here except that they were slow on updates and yet you hate them with a passion. The part of them that I ever talked to was a great group of people.

Ah, my anecdote isn't valid, but yours is. Got it.

> OmniROM gets praise for not using any CM code. It just so happens their team is a lot bigger than PA's.

That tends to happen when your entire team leaves and goes to work for a company.

> And PA isn't dead. Nobody ever said that. Just because everyone's gone into hiding and because you see nothing on GitHub (ever heard of private repositories?)

PA died long before OnePlus was ever part of the picture. I don't mean their ROM doesn't exist anymore. I'm talking about their complete and utter lack of innovation and ingenuity, something they were the kings of for the longest time. Per app DPI settings? Halo? Peek? These were all incredible pieces of design and well thought out. All of those disappeared when they flipped their shit, dumped CyanogenMod codebase, and started from scratch, taking several months to even come up with a working QuickSettings management implementation that was not even as good as CM's.

> I also wonder how much you know about working as a software dev under OnePlus: Who can say with full determination that these Paranoid Android developers are the sole factor here?

Who can say with full determination that they are not? We're talking about software updates and software quality here, it stands to reason that the people responsible for handling the software are likely responsible for the delays.

I owned a OnePlus One and after the touchscreen issue was fixed for me, I quite liked it. I made the mistake of buying a OnePlus Two which had terrible software, and I held out for as long as I could before switching to a 6P. I watched the decline in the quality of the ROM from COS to OOS, and it was pretty bad.

Sorry that I've touched a nerve, you'll have to deal with that.

someone755

I have no idea how I can form a coherent response to this... I'll try, I guess.

You provide no reasoning behind your calling them egotistical morons. I didn't say your opinion wasn't valid, just that you didn't present it with anything that would help us understand; Did they send you death threats or kill your hamster? I'm just saying that I've talked to quite a few of them and from that I base my opinion of how cool they are. If anything I was asking you to back up your claim.
You're also saying that their entire team had left for OP, which isn't true. Only a part of the team was hired, but like you said, the so-called decline began much sooner.
The reason OmniROM was started was because it was quickly becoming evident CM was shit (and it still is). PA decided to move away from all that, and I can only respect that such a relatively small team decided to ditch CM, even if that meant features were coming slower. It did not by any means mean things were going downhill. Good development with your own, clean code base simply takes time.
Your opinion on the software is yours only, and I can't judge it because all I've seen from Oxygen OS is what my friend's 1+X is running.

You haven't really touched a nerve, it's just that you assume too much. Just like all of the fans, you've given up and started shunning them for not developing anything outside of their jobs anymore.
That said, even though I'm small fry, I do have some connections in the development world.

Welp, that was much more fluid than I had expected it would have been.

AuroraFlux

> The reason OmniROM was started was because it was quickly becoming evident CM was shit (and it still is).

That's all I needed to hear to know your opinion is even more biased than mine.

CyanogenMod is still king (as long as you know the difference betweeb CyanogenOS and CyanogenMod). There are still hundreds of volunteers who work on CM to fix security issues, bug squash, and add features at a pace far faster than Google has.

At this point, you don't use CM because you want a million options; you use CM because it's a solid base that you can depend on. For a lot of devices, especially the Snapdragon based ones, CM is the only hope they have.

I don't know why you keep bringing up OmniROM. It's as though you really badly want me to say something about them. I don't need to say anything about them, as most every AOSP-based custom ROM starts with CM trees, not Omni trees. Hardware trees are king.

> and I can only respect that such a relatively small team decided to ditch CM

And I can't. From a logical standpoint, dumping a stable, mature codebase to start over again was a sign they were going to fail.

> It did not by any means mean things were going downhill.

Their commit history is slow, their current progress is almost nil. We've heard little about what they want to do, and there's fewer and fewer devices each day running it. ParanoidAndroid as we once remembered it is long gone and dead. They're community members, I get it. They were doing it on their own free time and charging nothing for it at all. I can appreciate that. But that doesn't change the fact their software has taken a turn for the worse, both the ROM they used to be known for and OxygenOS.

> Your opinion on the software is yours only, and I can't judge it because all I've seen from Oxygen OS is what my friend's 1+X is running.

I, stupidly, convinced 3 of my friends to buy a OnePlus 2. None of them have it anymore either. From BT issues to camera issues, there was just non-stop instability. Not to mention despite dozens and dozens of bug reports, their implementation of on-screen-keys could not get along with some apps like SnapChat, which meant that the soft keys would overlap with buttons you needed to press, forcing two of my friends to turn off soft keys whenever they wanted to use SnapChat. That issue was present in the last 2.X Oxygen release that came out.

> Just like all of the fans, you've given up and started shunning them for not developing anything outside of their jobs anymore.

Completely wrong. They have their jobs. They just need to do them better. I only bring up their PA history because it's obvious they were directionless now and they're not much better here.

Sorry that this is so sensitive for you.

someone755

It is evident from your replies you do not know how CyanogenMod works. You haven't heard of how they treat developers, and most importantly, how they treat their code. My opinion is perhaps too negative towards CM but honestly from everything I've heard and read (including current device maintainers who only maintain devices because they somehow get paid -- I couldn't get more out of them because of their NDAs and all) I just can't bring myself to see them in a different light.
If ditching this stable base as you call it meant a sign it was all going to fail, then how come OmniROM is still here?
Yes, again, I mention Omni. It's because they are cold and hard evidence that starting off fresh from AOSP doesn't necessarily mean things are going to fail. And they are the people who had the guts to quit being CM developers to risk a lot on a platform that only just started.
People start out with CM trees because they're the most readily available. CM is the most used ROM, so it's no wonder Billy from 9th grade took CM trees to start his own ROM. It's an endless loop that goes something like this:
while cm_popularity > 9000 {
cm_popularity++;
}

So your logical standpoint is obviously missing some of the backstory. And only if you know the complete saga can you judge and say you understand their decision. A banal comparison: It's like putting all the blame for WW2 solely on Hitler, yet not taking into account the punishments the German people had to endure after WW1.
I know commit history has been slow. But the team switched to a clean base when a new version of Android had been out already (so they fell behind -- CM could have reused tons of code from earlier JB versions), and shortly thereafter OnePlus started hiring the team's core members. Basically they had to do double the work in zero time.
Lastly, like I said, I cannot judge OxygenOS. I'm not defending their work under OP's roof and I don't intend to (though like I said in an earlier reply, I'm not ruling out the possibility that somebody who isn't part of the software engineering team is involved in the delays and bugs). What I can judge are your subtle ad hominem attacks, and it'd be great if you could stop that.
By the way I'm still waiting for you to show me there were assholes involved. I mean obviously there had to be a few lol, it wasn't *that* small of a group.

AuroraFlux

I mean this with respect, but it's an opinion I have based on my experience, and I get that you disagree, but you're not open to any sort of criticism at all and you won't allow anything negative about those you are fans of.

I've got nothing more to say, because I'm not interested in a war of "which custom ROM series is the best". The fact of the matter is that PA's quality was on the decline ever since they ditched the CM codebase, and each iteration of OxygenOS was substantially worse than its competing OEM software. I draw parallels between PA and OOS because both seem very vague, without much direction, and neither are/were very stable in their feature set.

Anything else you have to say about CM this or OminROM that are pretty irrelevant here. There's not much of an argument to be had if you want to just keep strawmanning every single point into something else of be totally dismissive of actual issues.

someone755

I do accept criticism of anything if the critique has a firm base to stand on.
I'm not waging war on ROMs (though I admit my hatred towards CM can get annoying), I'm telling you what happened and why PA has become what it now is (and what you don't see but still exists, somewhere deep within what's left of the developers). As it stands, you're only using your observations to draw conclusions that aren't really what happened, or what is happening at the moment. I keep saying that my judgment of OOS is moot since I've hardly used the thing. So "what the actual issues are," I don't know. I never said I did.
Your main point if I understand correctly is that OOS sucks, just like PA did, and the people behind both are assholes. And I'm arguing against the latter two because I know how PA went down and approximately where it is now (for example, PIE controls seem to be getting integrated back into the ROM again).

You may see me as protective, and you'd be right. I'm protecting the truth I know, and the truth I have evidence for in private messages and such all around me.

AuroraFlux

> You may see me as protective, and you'd be right. I'm protecting the truth I know, and the truth I have evidence for in private messages and such all around me.

And we come full circle; it's an argument based on our own personal anecdotes. I have anecdotes that don't match up with yours, no matter how much more valid you think they are.

I don't know if the people working on OOS are "assholes". I do remember dozens of extremely unpleasant interactions with PA developers.

The similarity I do see is in the direction of OOS now compared to PA of then. I get that you're buddy buddy with people close to the situation, but that really doesn't matter to me.

The "for the community" argument may have worked when they were just a community ROM, but when they became the ones officially in charge of a paid product's OS, all that goes out the window. Their development of OOS is much like CM's development of COS; they both seem to realize that being an OEM software company instead of just a community ROM is hard work.

I don't know why we're still arguing.

someone755

I didn't think we were ever arguing, I honestly just wanted to know what made you think they're bad people while giving you insight into the "behind the scenes" of what really transpired when development pretty much stopped.

AuroraFlux

"What really transpired" isn't really important to me, as my issues with the PA team and OOS have nothing to do with internal politics and everything to do with the outward facing aspects such as the declining quality of their ROM.

>now they're letting down OnePlus (who sadly need a software win now more than ever).

Agreed. The OnePlus dev team is doing a REALLY sucky job...

That being said, there's a lot of things wrong with what you're saying here:

>all that the PA devs ever did was take 8 months to build a feature that CM already had working

Oh yeah? You realize that up until the JB days (the peak for PA) their ROM had the most unique and original features right? Pie controls, Hybrid mode, HALO, Hover (they had it first I guess, before CM found those hidden commits in KK source) etc.
Its only after 4.4 that they just...lost it.

>like the "High Volume Warning Dialog" option; it would only show up as a modal dialog if you raise the volume past a certain level...there was no actual toggle for it in any of the settings. Who does that??

Uhh, stock Android? The high volume threshold dialog is a stock android feature. And adding an option to disable it doesn't seem like a bad thing (its frankly annoying sometimes). That's what "options" means.

>Not much respect for them. They abandoned their ROM, let down their community

Yes they did, but that speaks more about the community than them. The community expects to just keep receiving the good stuff, not realizing that these people have lives of their own and building custom ROMs was just a hobby for them (that's why I agree about the post OnePlus situation...they're actually getting paid for developing so what the hell?). They don't owe the community anything, if anything, its the other way round.

Đức Thành

Agreed on all counts, and especially the last point. When building ROMs for the community it's just a hobby for them, they don't owe the community jack.

AuroraFlux

I'd like to clarify, I have huge respect for PA back when they were doing innovative and really cool things. Let's be honest, Halo was incredible unique, and Hover was actually the precursor to what would ultimately become Heads Up in actual Lollipop. That and Peek, PIE, Per App DPI...

Those were the golden days. They pushed the envelope on what was cool and useful (I remember back when not all apps played nicely with custom DPI, I had a custom DPI just for GMail).

It was only AFTER they decided to nuke what they had and start from scratch did their ROM go downhill. I need to clarify something on that topic, because you completely misunderstood what I said.

> Uhh, stock Android? The high volume threshold dialog is a stock android feature. And adding an option to disable it doesn't seem like a bad thing (its frankly annoying sometimes). That's what "options" means.

I know the high volume threshold was a stock Android feature, and I know disabling it is a great option. I completely agree with it. HOWEVER. There was no option to explicitly disable it. The only way to actually turn your volume up, wait for the dialog to show up, and only THEN it allowed you to disable it. There wasn't a seperate, dedicated panel with an option that said "Enable or Disable High Volume Warning". That's sheer stupidity, because I already knew what this option does. I didn't need something to wait until I first encounter the warning to then let me disable it.

Their ROM was FULL of these idiot decisions. I remember reading their enormous FAQ thread and almost every single option was contextually activated, not contained in a dashboard or settings menu like normal custom ROMs. You had to actually trigger the thing by figuring out what scenario they expected you to go through before you could customize anything. They tried to make it so that it politely let you know that it could do A and B, but only if you do C first.

> They don't owe the community anything, if anything, its the other way round.

I completely agree. Back then, they owed the community nothing. But that doesn't change the fact that the ingenuity and innovation we experienced in previous versions died after JB, and the same lack of direction or cohesive experience is visible even now in OOS, which has less than half the features that COS has with bugs that COS never had.

Berkay

"Oxygen OS is about as close to stock Android as you can get without being a Nexus."

You forgot about Motorola.

Grayson

I didn't forget. I just don't think it's closer to stock Android. Motorola and OnePlus are about on par in my opinion. Both are about 95% stock with just a few additions.

Kind of irrelevant question. But have they stopped supporting OTA updates for the OnePlus One? Because I still use it and I normally don't cycle out getting new phones as frequently as some other people.

Jonas Pedersen

I've heard there would be 2 years support on it, from the point of release.
If that's the case, then the support is soon out, yes.

Thanks. I'll have to try that out sometime. I prefer not to root my main phone yet. I just don't want to risk bricking it.

Roberto Virga

As far as I know, OTA updates for the OPO are handled by Cyanogen Inc. This is both good news and bad news. The good: probably it's going to get a Marshmallow update. The bad: there will be a lot of Microsoft bloatware that will come along with it.

Hopefully we'll get the marshmallow update soon then (or N if better). Also boatware is only bad if you can't uninstall it.

someone755

Now just Sony left--
Who am I kidding, I give up.

Cakefish

Sony Z5 series has Marshmallow now.

someone755

thanks, I'll just sit here with the other 12 models they announced would get 6.0 but haven't yet.

Cakefish

Hope you don't have to wait long.

Jerry Rich

Guaranteed there will be bugs a plenty in this mess. Maybe an "OTA" will be released in the coming years, maybe not.

KlausWillSeeYouNow

You're talking out of your ass. There are very few, if any, bugs in this release. Give credit where it's due.

Jerry Rich

OnePus X is a joke. Read their forums and you'll find that there is very little tech support and lots and lots of bugs and hardware issues. End of story!

KlausWillSeeYouNow

I am active on the forums. You have no idea what you're talking about. Repeating a false claim doesn't make it true. End of story!

fcjan

I can see people hate OnePlus, nothing new, people love to hate on everything.. BUT in my opionion I can't see anything wrogn with OP2? Sure Oxygen OS is not as good but I've been using CM13 for few weeks now and it works perfectly, no bugs so far.. For the price, less than half the price of Galaxy S6, Xperia Z5, One M9 I honestly can't complain..

KlausWillSeeYouNow

People HERE hate OnePlus. The artificially-provoked hysteria and controversy is especially vibrant at AP, although lately they've toned it down a bit (probably don't want to pay for a OP3 review unit).

I have an OP2. It's a great phone and a great value. I love mine.

me me

Hysteria is what you do to yourself. If someone in China can make you be manipulated then spineless weakwhilled you are.

It is exchange of product for money, you get a full refund on delivery if you don't like it. Anything happens after that is just more goodness. For $430 delivered with accessories when I got mine in November it was excellent value